Kapiolani Park


Kapiolani Park is in Waikiki on O'ahu. On any day you'll find people using the park all day long for a variety of things. This day (Dec 4th, 1996) we find the park pretty much empty at 1:45 in the afternoon. Tents have been set up down near the Kapiolani Bandstand for the upcoming Honolulu Marathon and activities. There will be upwards of forty thousand in the park this weekend for that event.

Working on this VR, I finally discovered how to lick a problem known as "banding" where radically different exposures or light values from one frame to another leads to graying and banding of that graying, in a section of the vr. To adjust for banding in this VR, 11 out of 16 exposures had to have their brightness and contrast adjusted in photoshop before stitching. It added several hours to the process but the results are worth it. Now, I have to find time to go back and redo some earlier ones that suffered from banding.....oh brother...a webmaster's day is never over.

Banding and mixed lighting are similar but not always the same. Mixed lighting can show itself when you shoot a full 360 degrees of any location, especially here in Hawai`i where trade winds blow clouds around so fast you're lucky to get 2-3 minutes of similar, consistent lighting anywhere. Some banding you can fix, mixed lighting you sometimes just have to live with.

For those of you who do VR's this one took almost five and a half hours to do, from shoot to finish. Several stitches were performed. I finally stitched this VR interactively so as to able to fine tune overlap of the exposures.

All Quicktime VR's and photographs on these pages were shot & produced right here in Hawai`i and are copyright 1996 Hot Spots Hawai`i & Abbett VR Services

Some of our digital imaging equipment graciously provided by our good friends at 3Com.